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Teaching African History in South Africa: Post www.ssoar.info Teaching African history in South Africa: post- colonial realities between evolution and religion Waetjen, Thembisa; Parle, Julie Veröffentlichungsversion / Published Version Zeitschriftenartikel / journal article Zur Verfügung gestellt in Kooperation mit / provided in cooperation with: GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Waetjen, T., & Parle, J. (2005). Teaching African history in South Africa: post-colonial realities between evolution and religion. Afrika Spectrum, 40(3), 521-534. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-104809 Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer CC BY-NC-ND Lizenz This document is made available under a CC BY-NC-ND Licence (Namensnennung-Nicht-kommerziell-Keine Bearbeitung) zur (Attribution-Non Comercial-NoDerivatives). For more Information Verfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu den CC-Lizenzen finden see: Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.de afrika spectrum 40 (2005) 3: 521-534 © 2005 Institut für Afrika-Kunde, Hamburg Julie Parle / Thembisa Waetjen Teaching African history in South Africa 1 Post-colonial realities between evolution and religion ducational transformation in South Africa over the last decade has created Enew pathways for young people from disadvantaged educational contexts to enter university, and a range of supportive ‘bridging’ courses in the hu- manities and social sciences now exist at many institutions of higher learning. Within these programmes, course developers face the difficulties of develop- ing a curriculum that focuses on ‘foundational’ knowledge whilst also being relevant to local and regional issues and concerns. Our paper summarizes de- bates around and related to a year long course called ‘Africa in the World’ (AITW), currently taught at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. After outlining the aims and structure of the course, we offer a critical assessment of our ex- periences developing and coordinating AITW, highlighting some of its diffi- culties and challenges, as well as contextualising some of the most problem- atic areas for our students. Enabling access to tertiary education for individuals hailing from disad- vantaged educational contexts is an important aspect of democratization in South Africa, and a stated avenue identified for redress of social inequalities, past and present. Present schools continue to fall short in the quality of edu- cation and the social divisions in the educational system produced by apart- heid prove notoriously difficult to eliminate. A majority of students in the re- gion are under-prepared for successful completion of university. 2 A recent press report indicated that about half of first year students who begin tertiary education have dropped out, failed, or been excluded by their second year. Of those that remain, only half complete their degree in three years.3 Such cir- cumstances justify the formation of an ‘extended curriculum’ in which under- prepared students are allotted an additional year at the beginning of their studies to hone their study skills and garner a knowledge-base appropriate to their chosen area of study. 1 This is the revised, considerably shorter version of a paper originally presented to the Bi- ennial Conference of the South African Historical Society at the University of Cape Town, 26 to 29 June, 2005. Please contact the authors ([email protected] or [email protected]) for a full-length paper, offering more factual information on the origin, structure and context of AITW. 2 Boughey, C., From Equity to Efficiency: Access to higher education in South Africa. In: Arts and Humanitiesin Higher Education 2 (1)2003: 65-71. 3 'Kick out eternal students’: Education Minister gets tough', The Weekend Witness, 13 May 2005. 1 522 Julie Parle / Thembisa Waetjen ‘Bridging’ programmes have been a favoured method of providing instruc- tion in the skills and knowledge-based considered necessary to succeed in mainstream university studies. The Humanities Foundation Year (HFY) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, is one such programme. Funded both by the Norwegian government and the Department of Education, its mission is to prepare ‘students from schools disadvantaged in terms of monetary and human resources’ for university study through a curriculum of modules that ‘develop a range of knowledges, competencies and skills, involving concep- tual depth’.4 Because of its admissions criteria, virtually all of Foundation students are African, the majority for whom isiZulu is a first language. There are 80 students in Pietermaritzburg and 108 at Howard College. Most come from rural or township educational institutions. Recent research indicates that student perceptions of the selection criteria are somewhat negative: there is confusion and disappointment about the demographic narrowness of the access cohort, with some students feeling ghettoized.5 These demographic fac- tors, and the sensitivities associated with them, have also affected the experi- ence of teaching a course focused on Africa. Launched in 2001, ‘Africa in the World: From Nascence to Renaissance’ (AITW) was conceptualised as the ‘content’ and ‘bridging’ course on the Pietermaritzburg campus of the former University of Natal. Along with mod- ules in Academic Literacy and English Language Development, AITW runs across two semesters. It introduces the long-term history of Africa continent, its current situation, and its relationships with the rest of the world as they have developed over time. The placement of Africa at the heart of a foundation course has obvious appeal at a number of levels: ignorance of the continent’s past – both long- term and recent – contributes to its marginalization in school and tertiary cur- ricula, and, it may be argued, on the wider stage of national and international affairs. This neglect of African studies is, of course, in large part a legacy of a colonialist and apartheid discriminatory schooling and knowledge regimes. Simply reclaiming knowledge of the past – as the last several generations of social history have shown – carries emancipatory possibilities. One of the ma- jor objectives is to encourage the recognition and valuing of the continent’s many strengths, as well as to help participants think creatively about how an academic degree may help in meeting the challenges of Africa's many prob- lems. It was envisioned that in AITW students would: 1. Reflect on the dominant images of Africa today. 4 Human and Social Sciences Foundation Programme Template, UKZN. 5 Essack, Zaynab and Quayle, Michael Frank, ‘Student perceptions of a University access (bridging) programme for social science, commerce and humanities’ (unpublished paper, cited with permission of the authors). Teaching African History in South Africa 523 2. Gain exposure to scientific method and evidence-based analysis in the social sciences. 3. Learn the broad outlines of the theories pertaining to the origins of the universe, of the formation of our planet and its continents, of life, of the principles of natural selection and evolution. 4. Conceptualize time, chronology and change by constructing time–lines. 5. Identify the significance of Africa’s major climatic zones and geographi- cal features. 6. Understand, broadly, the background to the disadvantaged relationships between Africa and the West from circa 1500. 7. Be aware of the role that disease has played in world history, so as to as- sess the significance of the HIV/AIDS pandemic today. 8. Reflect on the elements that make up social identity: including culture, ‘race’, class, ethnicity and gender. 9. Develop an awareness of the different indices used for measuring eco- nomic and material disparities, and to be able to ‘read’ these in charts, graphs, and tables. 10. Comment on contemporary debates about globalization in regard to Af- rica. A variety of disciplines – from genetics, palaeontology, geology, linguistics, biomedicine, and theology – are reasserting the fundamental importance of this continent in world and human history. Scientists, politicians, educators and Africanist scholars have called for a new focus on the place of Africa in the world. Most importantly, many of these new avenues of inquiry – if cor- rectly understood – carry the powerful potential to demolish pejorative and essentialized constructions of racial and socio-cultural difference, and to as- sert the far deeper commonalities of human history. However, in designing and teaching the course it became apparent that the disciplinary boundaries between the Humanities and Natural Sciences are an impediment to understanding that 99% of the past that is usually omitted from our education – from the origins of the cosmos to the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens as the human race.6 The nature of the course material generates controversy (we will argue, a healthy controversy) among the students, as well as some of the teaching staff, largely because it proposes that embracing some elementary biology, physics, paleontology and zoology is a founda- tional pathway to those questions about human nature (behavioral, psycho- logical, social, philosophical, etc..) raised in the disciplines of a Humanities Faculty. Among the topics that prove most heated is the introduction of hu- man evolution, which places Africa at the center of human origins and yet si- multaneously raises the uncomfortable issues of racialized politics in global history, as well as the sensitivities
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